Benjamin Suslavich (Wake Forest Journal of Business & Intellectual Property Law) has posted Overdose: The Public Health Policies That Caused the Opioid Crisis (Cleveland State Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Recently, local governments have successfully sued pharmaceutical manufacturers for damages related to the opioid crisis in the United States under the theory that these pharmaceuticals were responsible for causing addictions and deaths across the nation. However, the opioid crisis was in fact caused by the creation of national public health policies which compelled the prescription of opioid analgesics. The dogma of the "pain movement," which spearheaded public health policies, was adopted in some form by nearly every healthcare regulator in the Country. With unchecked power and influence on the U.S. healthcare system, healthcare regulators mutated slightly misleading advertising by pharmaceutical companies into a trillion-dollar national disaster that has claimed the lives of over a million Americans.